1146 Tasting Notes

95
drank Jardin Bleu by Dammann Frères
1146 tasting notes

This tasting note for Dammann Freres’ advent calendar day 8 has been sitting in my drafts for months but I never posted it. This blend is delicious! It tastes like wild strawberry jam, or a high quality strawberry gummy. I am getting tired of the Dammann Freres advent having so many black teas, but it’s a good base here since it seems to have a caramel or brown sugar aspect to it. I made the first steep hot and the second as an overnight cold steep. Both were fantastic.

AJRimmer

Ha I have 30+ notes in my drafts that I’m gradually editing and will eventually post…I should probably do that :P

ashmanra

I agree with you – this tea is so delicious!

Kaylee

Thanks for the validation AJ!

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85
drank Red Jade by Volition Tea
1146 tasting notes

So I’m working through a few half-finished advents and countdown boxes, and the Volition/Yao Cha Tiger Box Year of the Tiger tea collection is one of them. This is Day 11. The dry leaf smells like malt, yams, and molasses. I’m always torn about how to brew teas from Volition – the instructions say to use a mug, but given the quality of the leaf I feel like it benefits from gong fu brewing. I did the first steep precisely per instructions and it came out tasty but just a tiny bit thin, so I switched over to gong fu after that. Even that first steep tasted like the dry leaf smelled, with absolutely no astringency or dryness. Subsequent gong fu steeps maintained that sweet potato and molasses flavor, but also felt just a little less robust than I’d ideally like for this flavor profile. I got a ton of steeps out of it though, and the good news is that this is a black tea that doesn’t hurt my stomach. If I had more I would experiment with using a bit more leaf than recommended.

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85
drank Lemon Dream Herbal Tisane by 52teas
1146 tasting notes

Lemon fluff! The combo of sweet, soft lemon and silky marshmallow really is a dream! So glad this one’s a tisane so I don’t have to worry about caffeine content. It reminds me, favorably, of Della Terra’s lemon chiffon. The flavoring there was lemon and cream on a rooibos/honeybush base, but both teas share a certain lemon-on-a-cloud vibe that I really love. Would be cool to see lime and orange variations on this blend! Those were tasty variants of the chiffon formula.

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drank Kapha Dosha by Rukhi Ayurveda Tea
1146 tasting notes

Sipdown for ashmanra’s sipdown challenge: tea with more than 5 ingredients. I picked this up YEARS ago at a tea festival – I don’t think the company even exists anymore. From a purely flavor perspective, this is not my favorite version of this type of blend, and that’s mostly because the pepper note is really prominent. That’s a big part of why I don’t love DavidsTea’s Super Ginger either. I like pepper in food, but a little goes a long way in a tea blend and I find that it’s easy to overdo it. Besides the pepper, I can taste lemongrass and ginger. Nothing else really comes through. Maybe that’s due to age, maybe it’s due to the blending ratios, I don’t know. I’ve been drinking this down over the past few weeks but can’t for the life of me remember what it tasted like when I first got it.

ashmanra

I’m with you! A little pepper goes a very long way in tea for me! I don’t mind a few of the pretty pink peppercorns.

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No. Just no. This is day 7 of the Dammann Freres advent calendar (I’m suuuuper behind but hoping to finish it off in the next month or so). I just really didn’t like this one. It smells and tastes like Bazooka Joe bubble gum, which is not a profile that I ever expected, wanted, or, as it turns out, enjoyed in a tea. One of the rare teas I couldn’t even bring myself to finish.

Flavors: Bubblegum

ashmanra

Those are flavors I would never have expected in a Christmas tea!

Cameron B.

Lol a few of their teas taste like bubblegum to me too, and this is one of them. :P

Kaylee

So good to know I’m not alone! Day 10 has mysteriously disappeared from my advent calendar. Since that’s the black Christmas Tea though, I’m not sure I’m missing much? It’s bugging me because I don’t want to go out of order or have to skip a day, but I don’t feel especially distraught about the specific blend that I might not get to try.

Cameron B.

I actually like their regular Christmas Tea, it’s more fruity than anything which is unusual. I know with my advent last year, some of the sachets slipped out of their spots and I had to go hunting for them in lower slots. Does kind of spoil the surprise though lol.

Kaylee

Thanks for the tip, I’ll do some extra digging!

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drank Hibiscus Flower by Adagio Teas
1146 tasting notes

Months and months ago, Cameron B. mentioned cold steeping hibiscus in lemonade. I’ve wanted to try it ever since, but only keep whole flower hibiscus around and it always felt wasteful to use that for an experiment like this. So I was pleased to get a sample of this with my Adagio order and finally be able to try hibiscus lemonade! The flower is very crushed up, so I put it in a tea filter bag, put the bag in a glass of lemonade, and stuck the whole thing in the fridge to cold brew. The lemonade started turning pink almost immediately. I let it cold steep for about four hours. Maybe I should have gone longer but I was really hot and needed something refreshing to cool off with! Unfortunately it was hard to tell whether the hibiscus really added anything flavor-wise. The color was a gorgeous, vibrant red, but it tasted sweet and tart in a way that lemonade usually does anyway. I’ll revisit this concept at some point, but this particular experiment seems to have had unremarkable results.

ashmanra

I want to try this now! I happen to have a pitcher of orange blossom salted lemonade in the fridge right now. Might do just a glass to start off and then try it again with a pitcher that doesn’t have as much going on.

Kaylee

Meanwhile I want to know more about orange blossom salted lemonade, that sounds delicious!

ashmanra

I found a recipe on The Spice House website and altered it! We make it both ways. For a half gallon – one cup lemon juice, one cup sugar dissolved in hot water (so just simple syrup really), 1/2 teaspoon salt, and one tablespoon rose water.

Fir the orange blossom version, I do every thing the same but leave out the rose water and substitute 2 tsp. orange blossom water.

We always double the recipe because it goes down fast! The salt adds texture and supposedly this is made with salt in the middle east to better satisfy thirst and to replace minerals lost in sweating.

I did pour some of it in a jar this morning and add a bit of hibiscus petals. It came out such a pretty color! Since it is already quite flavorful I didn’t really taste the hibby. I will definitely be doing this again, Ashman loved the color! He loves all foods pink, whether cupcakes or cookies or lemonade.

Kaylee

Thanks for sharing! Looking forward to trying this out!

ashmanra

Let me know how you like it!

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82

Ok, technically not a sipdown from today. This is from last night. I finished it off as an iced tea, brewed hot and allowed to cool. The fruitiness of it makes it a good choice for a summer evening drink. Plus I’m trying to clear out some of my current 52teas stash to make room for an incoming impulse order!

52Teas

Impulse orders are the best! :)

ashmanra

Oh, this sounds good!

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90

Another sipdown from today. I’ve been wanting to try this company for a long time, so I was very excited when a friend brought me back a sachet of this tea from a hotel stay! I am pleased to report that it did not disappoint. This is a tea for jasmine lovers, certainly. As soon as I opened the packet, a beautifully sweet jasmine perfume wafted up from the dry leaf. It wasn’t sickly sweet or artificial at all, but it was assertive. Brewed up, that sweet jasmine perfume softens a little bit, and there’s also an aroma of green beans and butter. The company’s website lists jasmine, steamed greens, and brown sugar as the tasting notes. I don’t know about the sugar, but the jasmine and steamed greens feels exactly on point. I got three extremely solid steeps out of this.

I’ve been drinking a lot of T2’s China Jasmine lately, and it just completely wilts next to this tea. This is one I’d be happy to revisit given the opportunity.

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drank French Provence by Spice Professors
1146 tasting notes

One of several sipdowns today! I’m surprised I never made a tasting note for this one – when it was fresh, I really loved it. Unfortunately, its flavor has faded quite a bit over the years. The floral notes are almost entirely gone. There’s still a hint of sweet-tart berry flavor. Mostly it’s just woody rooibos, though. I happen to like that rooibos flavor profile so I finished it off without a problem, but definitely without as much enjoyment as when I first bought it. My fault for hoarding it so long, precisely because I liked it.

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drank Blow by Flyest
1146 tasting notes

Sipdown, and had it as an iced tea for ashmanra’s sipdown challenge. I brewed it hot and then let it cool. The aroma of the loose leaf is primarily floral, with maybe a hint of lemongrass. Once it’s brewed up, more of that tart lemon comes through in the scent. As for the taste, I get a savory, almost earthy flavor that I assume is the butterfly pea flower. That’s definitely the dominant note, with a refreshing lemongrass note coming in at the end of the sip and lingering afterwards. I really have to search for the jasmine, to the point that I think I’m imagining actually detecting it at all. Like all butterfly pea flower teas, this one is a fun color, and the flavor is a nice change of pace from a lot of the typical herbal blends, but I don’t personally love it enough to restock.

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she/her

Geek and nerd (shoutout to GeekSteep). Still trying to get a handle on this whole work/life balance while ALSO succeeding at work thing. I have some chronic illnesses that make that harder. Tea is my respite.

Favorite tea types, in order:
oolongs
green
herbal
white
yellow

Don’t drink:
black
pu’erh

A sampling of tea shops I like:
Te Company
Calabash
Volition
Tea Thoughts
Harney & Sons
Yunomi
Teavivre

RIP Butiki

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https://www.instagram.com/try...

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